I am standing in a great, echoing hall of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, surrounded by examples of man's mechanical wings: a replica of the Wright brothers' 1903 Flyer, Charles A. Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, and space capsules from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. The museum calls this exhibit, "Milestones of Flight," and describes it as "artifacts which represent major achievements in the history of aviation and space flight."
We learn here that the Wright craft was the first true airplane; and that Lindbergh and his monoplane made the first solo, nonstop, trans-Atlantic flight, from New York to Paris in 1927. Next to a copper-colored, teardrop-shaped spacecraft that carried the first men to the moon in 1969, is a placard celebrating the achievements of Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins. It says, "This mission culminated in the first human steps on another world."
Maybe those inscriptions are accurate and maybe they aren't. They certainly gibe with my understanding of history, with the things I was taught in school. But after the Smithsonian's handling of the Enola Gay controversy, I no longer feel inclined to take the museum's word as gospel.
Here is what happened: The Smithsonian planned to mark the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the first nuclear weapons with an exhibit titled, "The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II." The proposed exhibit would feature a section of the Enola Gay -- the B-29 that delivered the Hiroshima bomb -- along with photos of the devastating effects on the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But veterans groups complained that the exhibit did not put the destruction of the two cities in proper context. The veterans complained that the script dwelled on the horrible effects of the attacks but played down the fact that the atomic bomb shortened the war and made an invasion of Japan unnecessary, thereby saving untold lives.
I don't know whether the critics were right about this because I never saw a draft of the script for the exhibit. Neither, I suspect, did many of those who yelled the loudest. I do know that curators revised it at least five times in an attempt to mollify their critics. The Smithsonian finally surrendered Monday, announcing that it would offer a dramatically scaled-down exhibit -- the Enola Gay fuselage, with a modest tribute to the crew but no discussion of the bomb's effect on the Japanese or of the impact of its use on 20th century America.
Thus, what we'll see when the exhibit opens this summer will not be the result of scholarly research and debate but a compromise to the persistent attacks of a few. The controversy illustrates the interplay between history and popular opinion; the way society manipulates its collective memory in order to feel good about itself.
Keep that in mind as we enter Black History Month. Some of us may be comfortable pretending that blacks and other minorities were excluded from American history by accident, or because mainstream historians simply did not know about the contributions of minority people. But the more we learn, the more we realize that the exclusion was deliberate and that it continues today because some people prefer it that way.
"We've come a long way but we've got a long way to go," says Dr. Betty Gardner, president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. The Washington-based group was founded in the early 1900s by Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the historian regarded as the father of black history. "The curriculum still is not integrated the way it should be," says Dr. Gardner.
"Obviously, there is some resistance to the idea of integrating history," Dr. Gardner continues. "I mean, you can see this in the way angry white males complain that there's been too much about minorities and not enough about them. Obviously, they haven't bought into the idea that the minority experience is a valid experience."
Dr. Woodson called for black history in his book, "The Mis-education of the Negro." He might have named the work, the "Mis-education of America."